Santa brought me a Byonics Micro-Track RTG transmitter for Christmas. With our January 14th departure for Florida rapidly approaching I made up a Home Brew Antenna for the bottom of our RV-7A. Some of you might be interested in how I made my fiberglass belly mount antenna.
I started out with an aluminum mounting plate cut out of .040" sheet, a BNC through pannel connector with a solder mount, a 1/16" piece of copper coated steel gas welding rod, balsa wood to encase the antenna in something that looked like it belonged on an airplane and fiberglass materials to vacuum bag it all into a nice looking finished part.
Along with all of the above materials I used my trusty old "Lil Sucker" vacuum pump, that was made from an old refrigerator compressor.
The antenna with the aluminum mounting flange, BNC Connector, 1/16" antenna wire soldered into the BNC connector and balsa wood sanded to an airfoil encasing the antenna wire:
The antenna is wrapped in two layers of Rutan weave 8 oz. fiberglass cloth that was cut on the bias and applied with a very wet coat of West Systems epoxy. Next the wet messy assembly was wrapped with teflon coated peel ply followed by two layers of paper towel to act as a bleeder layer and the whole mess wrapped in blue vacuum bagging plastic. The vacuum bag is then sealed with vinyl construction caulk and a vacuum is drawn using the trusty "Li'l Sucker".
After curing for about four hours or so, using fast cure hardener, all the bagging materials are removed and a butcher knife is used to rough trim the edges of the fiberglass:
If all went well you should end up with something looking like this:
Here are all of the consumables, less the fiberglass and vacuum bagging materials:
I will get the antenna mounted tomorrow and will post some pictures of it installed on the airplane. If all goes well you should be able to see the track from the test flight at http://www.aprs.fi enter W9BOJ for the track to display.
I started out with an aluminum mounting plate cut out of .040" sheet, a BNC through pannel connector with a solder mount, a 1/16" piece of copper coated steel gas welding rod, balsa wood to encase the antenna in something that looked like it belonged on an airplane and fiberglass materials to vacuum bag it all into a nice looking finished part.
Along with all of the above materials I used my trusty old "Lil Sucker" vacuum pump, that was made from an old refrigerator compressor.
The antenna with the aluminum mounting flange, BNC Connector, 1/16" antenna wire soldered into the BNC connector and balsa wood sanded to an airfoil encasing the antenna wire:
The antenna is wrapped in two layers of Rutan weave 8 oz. fiberglass cloth that was cut on the bias and applied with a very wet coat of West Systems epoxy. Next the wet messy assembly was wrapped with teflon coated peel ply followed by two layers of paper towel to act as a bleeder layer and the whole mess wrapped in blue vacuum bagging plastic. The vacuum bag is then sealed with vinyl construction caulk and a vacuum is drawn using the trusty "Li'l Sucker".
After curing for about four hours or so, using fast cure hardener, all the bagging materials are removed and a butcher knife is used to rough trim the edges of the fiberglass:
If all went well you should end up with something looking like this:
Here are all of the consumables, less the fiberglass and vacuum bagging materials:
I will get the antenna mounted tomorrow and will post some pictures of it installed on the airplane. If all goes well you should be able to see the track from the test flight at http://www.aprs.fi enter W9BOJ for the track to display.
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